Jon’s goal with GoldMine was to build a product that people would stay in all day and use to capture their interactions with others by email, phone and traditional correspondence and then share with others inside your company network. Nimble is following the same idea but now is bringing together all web based interactions such as well as email and phone.

I’m reminded of the excitement in the early 90’s when explaining to clients why they should use a computer to track their sales interactions.

Response Point SP2 Features

Microsoft Response Point 1.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2) introduces new-and-improved features that expand communication options, empower administrators to better manage the system, and enhance the phone system experience for everyday users and callers.

Increase productivity and savings
•Intercom & Paging
•Voice dial any of your Microsoft Office Outlook contacts just by speaking their name
•Connect callers to the right person using the Automated Receptionist
•Monitor call activity with call status and call history features
•Customers can call your employees directly using Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers
•Free directory assistance saves time and money
Better Solutions for Trained Specialists
•Easy analog phone, digital line, VoIP adapter, and VPN support with new devices
•Launch a web page in response to an incoming call
•Upgrade firmware on phones and phone line adapters seamlessly with the upgrade wizard – automatically detects and provisions relevant devices

Enhanced Features
•Improved audio robustness
•Parked calls automatically return if left unattended
•Personal contacts can be called with specific services — for increased savings on long distance costs
Key Features
•Response Point button. Press the “magic blue button,” and take advantage of Response Point’s integrated voice recognition (IVR) technology.
•Voice commands. Use voice-activated commands to dial, transfer, and retrieve calls. You can also ask for the company directory or for free directory assistance.
•Voice dialing. Use your voice, instead of your phone keypad, to call contacts. This hands-free solution eliminates the need to memorize and press numerous key sequences.
•Management applications. Use the Response Point Administrator (for the system administrator) to set up and monitor the entire phone system. Use the Response Point Assistant (for the everyday user) to configure individual preferences, click-to-call contacts, and view call status.
•VoIP service. Configure Response Point with VoIP service, offered through SIP-trunking VoIP service providers, so that your business can send and receive calls over the Internet using cost-saving VoIP technology.
•VoIP gateway device. Configure VoIP service, either directly through the internet, or through an on-premise gateway device that helps improve service quality.

•Digital service. Configure voice service with a digital service provider. Digital service is often referred to as “T1,” “E1,” “PRI,” or “ISDN” by some service providers and in different regions.
•Direct-dial numbers. Configure direct-dial numbers so that you can give customers multiple business numbers without the hassle and cost of setting up new phone lines.
•VPN access. Take advantage of Virtual Private Networks so that people can use the phone system from remote networks.
•Automated Receptionist. Enable the automated voice to answer and direct calls all of the time, when the office is closed, or when your receptionist can’t take calls. You can customize the automated greetings, responses, and prompts that callers will hear when they navigate the phone system. You can record answers to questions that callers frequently ask the Automated Receptionist, such as “What are your business hours?”

•Customizable after-hours schedule. Schedule the Automated Receptionist to handle calls after-hours, on holidays, and during business closures.
•Automatic parked-call return. Have callers waiting in park for 3 minutes automatically returned to the person who originally handled the call.

•Intercom. Make 2-way intercom calls to individuals or groups. Also, send 1-way pages to individuals or groups using the intercom system.
•Call routing options. Choose how incoming calls are answered. You can have the Automated Receptionist, official receptionist, or multiple users, route calls when they come into your business.
•Click to Call. Use your mouse to call contacts from the Assistant. Double-click a name in the contact list, and Response Point dials the number for you.

•Call status. Check in-call and parked-call status from the Assistant by viewing status indicators.
•Call history log. Monitor incoming and outgoing call activity by filtering, sorting, and analyzing the data collected by a detailed call log.

•Park music. Play an audio file callers will hear as they wait in park.
•Incoming call notifications. Enable popup windows that identify incoming callers to appear on your computer screen.
•Voicemail retrieval by phone or e-mail. Receive voice messages as recordings or as e-mail attachments.
•Call-forwarding message. Turn on or off an announcement that notifies people when calls are forwarded.
•Contact import. Import batches of business and personal contacts from Microsoft Office Outlook, Windows Address Book (Windows XP), or Windows Contacts (Windows Vista).
•Free directory assistance. Voice-dial 1-800-CALL-411 to find business phone numbers in the U.S. and other information by saying “Call four one one.”
•Device firmware upgrades. Follow a three-step wizard to upgrade your phones and analog gateways with the latest firmware.
•Restricted access on phones. Designate phones for internal use or for calling emergency services only.
•Customizable URLs in notification windows. Integrate with 3rd-party applications to customize the links that appear inside incoming call notifications.

•Multi-function gateway devices. Configure hybrid gateway devices that have both FXO and FXS ports, or can be used for either analog or digital service.
Additional Features
•Easy-to-follow configuration wizards. Walk through complex administrative tasks one step at a time. Wizards help guide you in configuring users, phones, voice service, and performing device firmware upgrades.
•Two-click backup and restore. Protect important phone system configurations, voicemail files, and contacts using this simple method.
•Automatic phone discovery. Add phones to the office LAN, and Response Point automatically discovers them, allowing you to start the configuration process instantly.
•Bypass Receptionist. Directly connect callers to specified extension numbers, bypassing the receptionist or Automated Receptionist.
•External Access. Permit specified external phone numbers (such as your mobile phone number) to access Response Point remotely.
•Call-forwarding rules. Tell Response Point how to handle calls when you can’t. For example, you can forward calls to your mobile phone after 5 rings.
•Parked-call transfer to voicemail. Forward a call to any voicemail box when someone wants to leave a voice message for you or another Response Point user.
•Improved DTMF detection. Change the channel that detects touch tones to reduce speech misrecognition, often caused by background noise and variable service requirements.

The single user sales rep has the luxury of picking out almost any of these products and with lots of trial and error can get it to work for them. Microsoft Business Contact Managemet ( BCM) is not a good choice, the database sync is difficult. Outlook add-ins like Prophet can be difficult to sustain against the onslaught of Office and Windows security updates.

Microsoft now offers Dynamics CRM online but requires 5 users. There are other third party MS CRM hosts who will do a single user. Its easy to use because it integrates well with Outlook.

GoldMine is finally after 10 years of stagnation getting some improvements. You can now keyword search the database. There is also a preview window of each “tab” record as you scroll down them.

My salesforce users are overall satisfied. There are some buggy aspects to the applictation such as the html editor for template emailings. Watchout with their pricing, you could get hooked on Team version and then add another person and find yourself spending $800/person/year.

I have never deployed InfusionSoft but I have to comment that the people selling to me who use it are doing things right. It must be very easy to set up a drip marketing email workflow in it.

There are many small online offerings that are two numerous for me to keep up with. I am leery of very small online vendors, especially the free ones. I’ve had more than one experience where we are happily using the free product only to get an email essentially announcing the vendor is ready to “monetize” their offering.

I do a lot of integration of financial data into CRM platforms. The work can be time consuming and expensive. That’s why I believe the future of CRM is that it needs to be pre-integrated with the backoffice software. NetSuite is a good example of this. They offer competent financials, CRM and even ecommerce in one online package. Expensive but may pay off depending on your circumstances.

The very small business market (1-15 users) is underserved by these vendors. Either pricing is too high or deployment and ongoing maintenance are over burdensome to the business. I’m not saying to skip investing in CRM software. Sales and marketing are newest frontier in software technology for a reason – its harder to automate than financials. Even after 20 years (yes that’s when I started selling Act.) CRM is still difficult to implement and takes ongoing training of users to keep the data up to date and clean.

The trick is to start simple but create a road map to where you want to be. Set incremental goals on a timeline and work towards them. If you use a CRM consultant as a guide and teacher instead of a crutch you will get a lot out of the relationship and pay less than you think. A warning to small business owners – you can’t delegate this out, you must be chief CRM officer. Some businesses hire someone, I train them on the CRM system, they don’t document anything and then leave and we start over again.

Find out what software other’s in your industry are successfully using. Don’t reinvent the wheel, this isn’t rocket science, its simply a software package to track interactions with prospects and clients, use that data to target them with relevant messages and finally track sales and customer satisfaction.